Bluehost issues

dougc · 2013-06-28 03:41:23

About two months ago I switched from Network Solutions to Bluehost because of major problems publishing galleries to my Network Solutions host and the high recommendations by TTG for Bluehost. I have been generally very happy with Bluehost: flawless gallery publishing and easy to reach and helpful technical support.

Unfortunately, the reliability of Bluehost has not been as good as I expected and seems to be getting worse. At this moment, both my web hosting and my email are down. Lately (for several weeks), it seems both my web site and my email response times have been slow and times when my web server have been down have been more frequent than my experience with Network Solutions.

Apparently the current email downtime is due to Bluehost technical personnel cleaning up their email servers following a Bluehost customer using his/her account to generate so much spam that other companies' email servers were blacklisting the Bluehost servers and email originating from Bluehost servers was being rejected. I experienced this "rejection" when sending emails to a number of my regular email correspondents.

I am pleased that Bluehost is addressing this problem and that their technical support has been transparent about the cause of the service interruptions. Nonetheless, I am concerned about these problems and wonder if Bluehost has the capability to insure in the future that his type of behavior by one or more of their customers is stopped short so that it doesn't impact all of their customers negatively.

As TTG strongly recommends Bluehost, I wonder if Matt has any insight into whether this is a problem that Bluehost has the capability to solve or if the up-and-down nature of their web server service and the problems with email reliability and blacklisting may continue to occur.

I surely do not want to change web/email hosts again. It is a major effort and time sink! However, lately the uptime and reliability of Bluehost has been, in my opinion, significantly substandard for the industry.

Matthew · 2013-06-28 14:26:32

I have personally had no issues whatsoever with Bluehost. http://campagnapictures.com/ has been running without issue, and with no downtime that I am aware of. The problem you describe with the user sounds to me like an isolated incident over which no host could have control, and which coincidentally has occurred on a Bluehost server. I'm sure they will take whatever measures they can to ensure that the problem does not happen again, or that if it does happen again that the impact of such an incident will be as minimal as possible. The only way to get away from such things would be to abandoned shared hosting platforms altogether. But then you'd be paying a lot more for a dedicated server. The Turning Gate runs on MediaTemple's "DV" service (dedicated virtual server) for $50/month. It's great, but I pay more for two months of hosting with MediaTemple than I pay for a year of hosting with Bluehost for my Campagna Pictures website.

dougc · 2013-06-29 07:54:43

Matt,

Thanks for your thoughts. I understand how one bad apple who happened to be on the same shared server as mine can spoil the experience for me and others on that server. And, as you note, the cost of a shared server is very affordable compared to a dedicated server! Unfortunately, it does seem to be taking Bluehost a long time to fully resolve the problem. It's close to 36 hours since my family and I noted that our email accounts and family web sites (two) were completely down and, while they are back up, response is very slow. If you care to go to www.collinsnet.us or www.thewilderness.us I think you will see what I mean. I expect they will completely resolve this soon (maybe before you see this post and have a chance to check my sites) and that my experience will return to that you have had and that I had experienced on Bluehost until recently. Hopefully this type of event will not happen to my server again!

Thanks for giving me some confidence that this is a very rare event.

Doug

Kris · 2013-06-29 13:36:22

Use an uptime monitor to give you exact logs of your 'downtime' and take that to bluehost.

I use

http://www.uptimerobot.com/

and follow their simple instructions. Make sure it looks for a specific insignificant file so that it doesn't interfere with your google analytic.

dougc · 2013-06-29 14:28:29

Thanks! I didn't even know such a thing existed.

Kris · 2013-06-29 18:50:00

Edit - they seem to have changed their policies since last I looked regarding the 'insignificant file'. Just follow their instructions.

Matthew · 2013-06-30 14:27:58

Don't know whether things are "back to normal" yet for your sites, Dougc, but I just had a click on the both of them and they came right up. If you're still experiencing issues, it may be worth clearing your browser cache, quitting and restarting the browser to give the page loads a fresh slate.

dougc · 2013-07-01 13:02:54

Matt,

Thanks for checking my sites. Yes, they have been mostly up over the past 24 hours. I wish the problem was as easy as clearing my cache. I followed Kris' suggestion (Thanks Kris!) and signed up at www.uptimerobot.com to monitor the uptime/downtime of my sites. Not surprisingly, the data from Uptime Robot over the past 24 hours is almost identical for the two sites. Both sites have had between 93-94% uptime over that period. With this uptime it is not surprising that the sites were up when you checked. Downtimes have ranged from about 5 minutes (their sample period) to 23 minutes. The three longest down periods recorded by Uptime Robot's sampling were 19, 23, and 21 minutes. I think most Bluehost customers would consider this unacceptable and assume that Bluehost techs are still working to get to the root cause and nail it dead. I hope so! If the down time periods are still happening tomorrow, I will call their tech support again for an update.

By the way, do you use Uptime Robot or a similar service to check the uptime of your personal Bluehost account? I would be interested in knowing if your measured uptime is good (> 99%).

I might be able to add your site to the sites I have Uptime Robot monitoring, but that would be rude (at best!) without your permission and may violate Uptime Robots policies (I have not checked their policies regarding that).

Thanks again,
Doug

Matthew · 2013-07-01 14:18:36

I don't use any such service. I spend too much time online as it is. The last thing I need is another thing to keep tabs on. =P

lofty · 2013-07-01 17:27:01

Hi Doug,

I use Bluehost and also use the Uptime Robot and I have had 100% uptime on my site over the last Month. I have also had no issues with email disruption. So I agree with the earlier suggestion that you have a localized server issue. Compared to my last ISP, Bluehost are excellent. Maybe they could move you to an alternate server if you are experiencing these outages?

-- Lofty

dougc · 2013-07-02 01:52:30

Lofty,

Thanks for the independent data point. That is very encouraging. If the problems with my server continue much longer, I will request a move to a different server. I will post updates on this thread. Hopefully it will soon be good news.

Doug

dougc · 2013-07-08 12:46:11

Update: I had some downtime on my server during the first few days of July. During the past two days my server uptime, reported by www.uptimerobot.com, has been 100%. Hopefully this will continue. Thanks for the help from those of you on the forum.

Doug

Matthew · 2013-07-08 13:02:38

Glad to hear things seem to be back to normal.

dougc · 2013-08-03 01:33:23

Update: It has been about three weeks since I reported that my Bluehost uptime had improved. Unfortunately, I have had a number of periods during the past three weeks when my domain (web and email) has been down. I submitted a service request (via Bluehost's online service request system) asking to be switched to a different server and never heard back from them. This morning my domain's email and web site have been down for hours. In fact, even the Bluehost.com main site is down and their phone lines are so busy it is not possible to get through. As painful a process as it is, I am nonetheless ready once again to switch hosting companies.

Is there a list of web hosting companies that are known to work well with the full TTG CE3 publishing package? Does anyone know if Network Solutions has fixed their problems with TTG CE3? I almost never had downtime problems with them and switched to Bluehost only because of the Gallery publishing errors with Network Solutions.

Thanks,
Doug

Ben · 2013-08-03 09:36:18

Hi Doug, as you've found, Bluehost and sister sites have experienced a major outage in the last 24 hours: http://mashable.com/2013/08/02/bluehost-down/
If this is a one-off issue then I wouldn't be jumping ship. Hosts in general do have issues from time-to-time, including more expensive dedicated hosting.

I doubt very much that NS has fixed the problems. I took support as far as I practically could, but never received a rational explanation of the cause or any indication that they'd try to resolve it.

dougc · 2013-08-03 13:56:33

Ben,
Thanks for the info on the major outage at Bluehost, et al. Until seeing this article I had no idea of the extent of the issue.

I wish I believed this was a one-off issue. However, I have had numerous periods of downtime in the past few weeks as well as significant downtime in the month of June. At least one other down period in July was also several hours long and a down period in June was many hours and rippled on for about a week. When I posted about that at the start of this thread, Matt replied that it was probably a one-off issue. Obviously, it was not. There have been at least three times in the past few weeks when none of my Bluehost hosted domain's email accounts could send or receive emails and people who were trying to email us were getting their emails bounced. A number of emails were completely lost, including an email from Stubhub that contained a link to print purchased tickets. My son had to work around that one to get his tickets. Just think what a catastrophe it would be if the email I received yesterday from TTG telling me about the new CE3 updates (including Publisher v. 1.1.1.1) had hit when my Bluehost server was down and I didn't get the message! :-)

In any case, I am giving up on Bluehost for email. As far as I am concerned, email should be as reliable as telephone service (i.e., the old Bell System landlines in the USA!). I am currently investigating Rackspace, which is about twice the cost per month for my half-dozen emails as Bluehost costs for the web plus email package. But, Bluehost has lost my confidence as an acceptably reliable email host. Fortunately, my web sites are just for sharing photos with family and friends and, thus, the downtime for them is not as critical. I can live with Bluehost for my web sites for at least a while longer. Not so for email and their failure to meet my email reliability needs.

The reason I asked about the status of Network Solutions hosting is that in about ten years with Network Solutions I did not have email downtimes in length or number anything like I have had with Bluehost since switching hosts four months ago. I will also investigate moving just my email back to Network Solutions, but so far it looks like Rackspace will be worth the extra costs.
Doug

Matthew · 2013-08-03 15:57:59

Sadly, these things happen. I think their handling of the situation has been exemplary, though. Setting up a dedicated blog and keeping users up-to-date on progress every thirty minutes as they worked to resolve matters shows their dedication and openness to their customers. Compare this to recent service outages at liveBooks and Fotomoto, leading up to the acquisition of liveBooks by WeddingWire and Fotomoto by Bay Photo, two entire months of complete silence and zero transparency from liveBooks while services simply failed without explanation, while customers were continuing to be billed for fees and orders for services and goods that would never be fulfilled.

If you're ready to jump ship, then that's your decision. I've used a number of hosts, and I still think Bluehost ranks among the best of them. Problems with occur at some point no matter what host you choose, and I think Bluehost by far has done the best job handling those problems when they arise.

As for email, you should setup with Google Apps and/or Gmail. I stopped using hosting mail servers a long time ago. Because I was moving sites around a lot before I settled on MediaTemple and Bluehost, I got sick of my email always being in a state of flux.

Matthew · 2013-08-03 16:29:56

Just for additional perspective, I was just checking in on Facebook. John Bishop -- who helped design our PHPlugins system and revamp our auto index script some years back -- had posted this on his wall:

"Over my IT career I have been at the centre of incidents like this. The response to the current issues at bluehost are first class! http://enduranceresponse.com/"

dougc · 2013-08-05 04:14:15

Matt,

Thanks for your replies to my previous post. I very much appreciate your time and dedication, not to mention your outstanding Lightroom plugins!

My quarrel with Bluehost has nothing to do with their compatibility with TTG plugins. It is excellent. It has nothing to do with their response to problems. They seem to work hard with all the resources they can muster to fix problems. Their openness was news to me, as during this latest event, the Bluehost web site was down and their phones were so overloaded I could not reach them. I had no idea (I find no mention of it on the Bluehost web site) that Bluehost was part of the much larger Endurance International (Wow, so many brands apparently all on the same servers!), so I did not know to access the enduranceresponse.com blog for info or updates.

My quarrel is that this is not an isolated case for me. I have experienced at least three multiple-hour down periods during "prime time" (daytime/evenings in my USA Pacific time zone) and many shorter but significant down periods in just a few months of hosting with Bluehost. Many emails that were important to me were lost during this few months and many times friends and family contacted me to ask why they couldn't email me and/or view my web sites. I have also had my email server "blacklisted" for the first time since I have been using my own domain for email (about ten years).

Maybe I have just been unlucky over these few months, but I am a firm believer that past performance predicts future performance.

I realize that I seem to be the only squeaky wheel on this subject on the TTG forum. However, this latest outage probably effected all of your customers who use Bluehost and the other Endurance International hosting companies. I hope that I do not need to see an entry in your blog, similar to that for Fotomoto, that you had to sever your relationship with Bluehost, not because of poor response or lack of transparency, but simply because of the number, frequency, and severity of the issues at Bluehost (Endurance International?) has been unacceptable to your customers.

Doug

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2013-06-28 03:41:23

Bluehost issues

#2 2013-06-28 14:26:32

Re: Bluehost issues

#3 2013-06-29 07:54:43

Re: Bluehost issues

#4 2013-06-29 13:36:22

Re: Bluehost issues

#5 2013-06-29 14:28:29

Re: Bluehost issues

#6 2013-06-29 18:50:00

Re: Bluehost issues

#7 2013-06-30 14:27:58

Re: Bluehost issues

#8 2013-07-01 13:02:54

Re: Bluehost issues

#9 2013-07-01 14:18:36

Re: Bluehost issues

#10 2013-07-01 17:27:01

Re: Bluehost issues

#11 2013-07-02 01:52:30

Re: Bluehost issues

#12 2013-07-08 12:46:11

Re: Bluehost issues

#13 2013-07-08 13:02:38

Re: Bluehost issues

#14 2013-08-03 01:33:23

Re: Bluehost issues

#15 2013-08-03 09:36:18

Re: Bluehost issues

#16 2013-08-03 13:56:33

Re: Bluehost issues

#17 2013-08-03 15:57:59

Re: Bluehost issues

#18 2013-08-03 16:29:56

Re: Bluehost issues

#19 2013-08-05 04:14:15

Re: Bluehost issues

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